Recently Published

Recall the Recall

by Ruth Rosen

POLITICIANS of all political persuasions are busy invoking the legacy of Hiram Johnson, the governor of California from 1911 to 1917, who pushed the constitutional amendments for initiative, referendum and recall that California voters ratified in 1911. These reforms set the stage for the state's tradition of "direct democracy." But does anyone really know what Johnson, who became governor without ever having held public office before, really wanted the recall to d

Interview with David Brooks

by Joseph S. Lucas

David Brooks is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon and Schuster, 2000) and the editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage Books, 1996) He is working on a book called How to Be American (forthcoming from Simon and Schuster). He was recently appointed an op-ed columnist at the NYT.Joseph Lucas: When you were in college, at the University of Chicago, you planned to beco

Why Are U.S. Policymakers So Fickle When It Comes to China?

by Jianwei Wang

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States-from policymakers to the public-has engaged itself in the seemingly endless debate about whether China is its friend or foe. Immediately after the Tiananmen incident and the demise of the Soviet Union, people debated whether this struggling communist regime would soon collapse and therefore was still worthy of friendship from the United States. After China achieved a remarkable economic "soft landing" and subsequent robust econom

Fixing Germany Wasn't Easy Either

by Leslie S. Lebl

A GERMAN FRIEND born in 1941 once recounted that he had been so hungry as a small child that, left unsupervised in the pantry, he ate an entire jar of mustard. The conversation made a strong impression on me, in part because of his bitterness toward the occupying powers that had presided over such conditions. Certainly, it did not match my view of German reconstruction as fast, easy, and successful from the start. Yet that view seems to be the model against which our performance in I

Column: Should the Federal Government Join Gambler's Anonymous?

by William Thompson

The case of Mr. Poindexter and latest move of the federal government to get into the gambling business is troubling, but there are precedents for such bad taste.The attempt of Poindexter to set up a futures market for when or where terrorists would attack fortunately was foiled and led to his dismissal from government service. The federal government's ventures into the gambling business prior to this episode have not turned out all that well either. The fir

Why Are There So Many Palestinian Refugees?

by Daniel Pipes

Here's a puzzle: How do Palestinian refugees differ from the other 135 million 20th-century refugees? Answer: In every other instance, the pain of dispossession, statelessness, and poverty has diminished over time. Refugees eventually either resettled, returned home or died. Their children - whether living in South Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel, Turkey, Germany or the United States - then shed the refugee status and joined the mainstream.Not so the Palestinians. F

Column: What a Mess

by P.M. Carpenter

The right wingers, muscle flexers, ideologues, pre-emptive strikers, the bunker blasters and the jingoists -- in short, the leaderless Bushies -- have once again screwed things up. They weren't satisfied with neglecting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the boiling point, or obsessing over a non-threatening goon like Saddam Hussein while ignoring a real-threatening goon like Kim Jong Il, or dropping Afghanistan back into the Taliban's lethal hands. Those were mere previews

Did You Know that the Radicals of the Middle East Used to Be Christians?

by Philip Jenkins

Though Americans may be a little fuzzy about identifying their deadliest enemies in the Middle East, they have few doubts that the chief demon-figures are solidly Muslim. Thirty or so years ago, Palestinian Arab terrorists and hijackers clearly represented the deadliest threat to the West, only to be replaced in the 1980s by Shi'ite groups like Hizbullah, and more recently by the still deadlier al-Qaeda. Behind these frightening names lurk the so-called bandit-states, like

Japanese Textbooks Aren't Getting Much Better

by Ishiyama Hisao

Since the 1980s, sharp debates have centered on Japanese government censorship of school textbooks. The treatment of such issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the military comfort women, and Japanese use of wartime slave labor have been contentious not only in Japan but also in neighboring countries of East Asia that were colonized or occupied by Japanese forces. But the issues are not confined to history. This article carries the story to the present, exploring the implications of

What Activists Can Learn from the Nuclear Freeze Movement

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Editor's Note: The following article is based on fresh research explored in the newest volume of Mr. Wittner's trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, published by Stanford University Press. His new book is called, Toward Nuclear Abolition (2003). At the moment, the Bush administration's militaristic approach to world affairs seems triumphant. From preemptive wars against "

Would Black Leaders Be Better Off as Outsiders?

by William C. Kashatus

Next week, Americans will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. The march's signature event, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, continues to stir the nation after four decades. Yet the black community still struggles to decide whether to follow King's prophetic tradition or to lead via political office. It's a difficult choice. Should black leadership choose the latter course, forgetting King's prophetic voice would be a ser

Is Bush Wasting His Vacation?

by Matthew Pinsker

President Bush is spending most of this month at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. By fleeing the White House, he continues a tradition of more than 200 years. That's noteworthy because presidents at ease tend to reveal key aspects of their character, just as Don Van Natta's recent book on presidential golf, First off the Tee, claims. Even more important, as the case of Abraham Lincoln demonstrates, a well-structured vacation can also help shape a great president. Washington be

Blackout 2003: The Debate We Won't Be Having This Time

by HNN Staff

On Tuesday November 9, 1965, at 5:30 p.m. New York City fell dark when the Northeast was hit with a massive power failure. Lights went out across 8 states. The blackout was triggered when a relay switch in Toronto failed. Four million homes in the metropolitan area were plunged into darkness. Although the disaster cost the economy of New York City tens of millions of dollars, it is remember

What's China Thinking?

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

What is China thinking? It's a question worth asking because the Chinese government has already defied conventional wisdom not just once but twice this year. First, in the spring, it took a surprisingly hard line toward the nuclear posturing by Pyongyang that has placed North Korea at the center of a diplomatic storm. Now it's taking a surprisingly soft line toward massive protests in Hong Kong that have directly challenged Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies

Hiroshima, 2003

by Tadatoshi Akiba

This year again, summer's heat reminds us of the blazing hell fire that swept over this very spot fifty-eight years ago. The world without nuclear weapons and beyond war that our hibakusha have sought for so long appears to be slipping deeper into a thick cover of dark clouds that they fear at any minute could become mushroom clouds spilling black rain. The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the ve

Why the Easy Generalizations About the Causes of Terrorism Are Wrong

by Walter Laqueur

Following is an excerpt from Mr. Laqueur's newest book, No End to War. To read the full chapter from which this excerpt is drawn click here . The causes of terrorism have been a source of bewilderment and misconceptions for a long time. It was widely believed that terrorism w

Column: Why We Should Pay Attention to Al Gore

by P.M. Carpenter

Even if you still resent the former vice president for losing the 2000 election to a greenhorned featherweight of Chauncey Gardner proportions, you must give Al Gore credit for making an extraordinary contribution to political debate last week. For forty sustained minutes in his New York speech he substituted high dudgeon with calm, surgical reasoning and concluded that the president of the United States is a liar. As is cus

President George W. Bush, Historian

by Eric Rauchway

President George W. Bush put the federal government into the history-writing business when he tarred his critics in June as "revisionist historians" and derided them for trying to "rewrite history." But if they were rewriting history, who wrote it in the first place? Why, George W. Bush, of course, and it falls to us private citizens in the historical profession, as his new colleagues, to evaluate his work-in-progress, "A History of the Iraq War, 2002

Changing the Constitution to Protect Adam and Eve?

by Ralph Luker

In June, after the Supreme Court found anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, Republican Sens. William Frist of Tennessee and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania endorsed a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and woman. Their impulse to protect traditional marriages may seem reasonable, but it's a bad idea. Why? Because it would write into the Constitution a

What Bill O'Reilly Should Have Told Ann Coulter

by Anthony Fuentez

It used to be taken for granted that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy is one of the great villains of American history. His crime always has been assumed to be his introduction into American politics of the practice of "McCarthyism" in the midst of the campaign of the late forties and early fifties to root out the influence of the Communist Party in American institutions. Though a complex phenomenon, the central feature of McCarthyism was a rhetorical style that entailed false or